Science-Book Challenge 2009
From Scienticity
Join the challenge any time in 2009.
The Science-Book Challenge is easy: read three science books in 2009, then tell others about the books you've read and help spread science literacy.
Reading about science--by which we mean to include engineering, mathematics, and technology, too--is fun and rewarding. We encourage others to read about science, and help potential readers find books that they will enjoy and profit from reading, by publishing our Book Notes, which are written by Ars Hermeneutica employees, volunteers, friends, and science-book challengers.
We're looking for science-book readers to help us help would-be science-book readers by sharing their own opinions about the science books they've read.
The 2009 Science-Book Challenge
- Read at least three nonfiction books in 2009 related somehow to the theme "Nature's Wonders". Your books should have something to do with science, scientists, how science operates, or science's relationship with its surrounding culture. Your books might be popularizations of science, they might be histories, they might be biographies, they might be anthologies; they can be recent titles or older books. We take a very broad view of what makes for interesting and informative science reading.
- After you've read a book, write a short note about it, giving your opinion of the book. What goes in the note? The things you would tell a friend if you wanted to convince your friend to read it--or avoid it. Naturally, you can read some of the existing Book Notes for ideas. You might like to read our Book-note ratings for ideas about how to evaluate your books.
- Don't worry if you find that you've read a book someone else has also read; we welcome multiple notes on one title.
- Get your book note to us and we'll post it with the other notes in our Book Note section. Use the book-note form or the comment form to get in touch with us.
- Tell other people about the Science-Book Challenge: http://ArsHermeneutica.org/besieged/Science-Book_Challenge_2009.
Stuck for ideas about what books to read? Write to us and we'll help you identify some books that will match your interests.
If you'd like to sign up and make your participation in the Science-Book Challenge public, send us your name and a link to your blog, if you have one, using our comment form.
Please help us tell others, too! Use your own blog to spread the word; use our Science-Book Challenge 2009 graphic to make it pretty.
Happy reading!
The Science-Book Challengers
Everyone should feel free to accept the challenge any time before the end of 2009. Decide on your book list at the beginning or be more spontaneous and choose titles as you go. Let us know that you're taking the challenge and we'll put your name here with other challengers, along with updates about your notes as you contribute them. You can use the handy comment form to reach us. You might find it interesting to look at last year's list of challengers in the Science-Book Challenge 2008.
Here are the people we are aware of who have accepted the Science-Book Challenge 2009.
Challenger | Link | Titles & Links to Book Notes |
---|---|---|
Melanie K. | The Indextrious Reader | Gary Paul Nabhan, Where Our Food Comes From : Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine |
Jenny S. | n/a | spontaneous |
Callista | SMS Book Reviews | spontaneous |
Lynda | Lynda's Book Blog | tentatively: Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? : And 101 Other Intriguing Science Questions, by Mick O'Hare A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson How to Dunk a Doughnut : The Science Of Everyday Life, by Len Fisher |
Violette Severin | The Mystery Bookshelf | spontaneous |
Lisa Clayton | n/a | spontaneous |
Lindy | n/a | spontaneous |
Jody | The Year of Readers | spontaneous |
Eva | A Striped Armchair | (Visit her blog for an extensive list of possible titles!) Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson, Napoleon's Buttons : How 17 Molecules Changed History Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist |
Brandi | The Reading Challenges Blog | spontaneous |
Melanie (MKI) | Cynical Optimism | Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible : A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel Philip Plait, Death from the Skies! : These are the Ways the World Will End-- Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish : A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body |
Care (CBC) | Care’s Online Book Club | Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief |
Kristi H. | Books and Needlepoint | Kay Chornook and Wolf Guindon, Walking with Wolf : Reflections on a Life Spent Protecting the Costa Rican Wilderness |
Pussreboots | Puss Reboots | Dr. Joe and What You Didn't Know by Dr. Joe Schwarcz Hawaiian Insects and their Kin, by F. G. Howarth and W. P. Mull Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, by Simon Winchester Mars, the Red Planet, by Isaac Asimov Roadside Geology of Hawaii, by Richard W. Hazlett and Donald W. Hyndman The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, by Michael Shermerer The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin |
Joanna | It's all about me | The Story of God, by Robert Winston The Force, by Lynne McTaggart God and the New Physics, by Paul Davies Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, by Alex Boese Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor, by Neil Shubin What the Bleep do we Know?, by William Arntz and Betsy Chasse The Quirks & Quarks Guide to Space : 42 Questions (and Answers) about Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Jim Lebans |
Debi | Reading Challenge Obsessed... | (Visit her blog for an extensive list of possible titles!) |
Jessi | Casual Dread | Tentative list: Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D. Ehrman The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan The Edge of the Sea, by Rachel Carson |
Rebecca | Rebecca Reads | Some possibilities: DNA, by James Watson Cosmos, by Carl Sagan Napoleon’s Buttons, by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins God’s Equation, by Amir Azcel A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. |
Judy D. | Intergalactic Bookworm | spontaneous |
raidergirl3 | an adventure in reading | spontaneous |
T. Robertson | n/a | The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Apirituality, by Dalai Lama Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales, by William Bass What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture, by Edward Slingerland Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, by Michael S. Gazzaniga |
Rich (RTS) | Dick-o's Deep Thoughts | Pat Shipman, Taking Wing : Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight Chris Beard, The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey : Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans |
EHL | n/a | Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown : The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Tim Foecke, What Really Sank the Titanic : New Forensic Discoveries Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything |
Adrienne (AJ) | Titles are Irrelevant | Steven H. Strogatz, Sync : The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order |
R. Williams | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
S. Poduska | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
C. Howard | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
J.P. Howard | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
J. Dorrance | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
T. Wilson | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
B. Kane | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
D. Robertson | facebook challenger | spontaneous |
Chile | Chile Chews | spontaneous |
Jen R. | Living Life Simply | tentatively: Blue Frontier, by David Helvarg The Earth Moved, by Amy Stewart Bottomfeeder, by Taras Grescoe |
Joyce | tallgrassworship | Watermania, by Eliazbeth Royte This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin The End of Food, by Paul Roberts |
Matheus | Second is the Rest | possibles: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman The Linguistics Wars, by Randy Allen Harris Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, by Daniel Dennett On Nature and Language, by Noam Chomsky Language and Mind, by Noam Chomsky The Empirical Stance, by Bas van Fraassen Pursuit of Truth, by W. V. Quine The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn |
psuklinkie | Light Up My Room | In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen The Anatomist, by Bill Hayes Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser The Way We Eat, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason |
Debra | n/a | spontaneous |
Rose | Making the Shift | spontaneous |
Brittanie | A Book Lover | tentatively: A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, by Jessica Snyder Sachs Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv |
Debbie | Rites of Passage | maybe: Miss Leavitt's Stars, by George Johnson The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins The Wisdom of Bones, by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman |
Ruchi (aka Arduous) | Arduous Blog | Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale, by Michael Thompson and others TBD |
Killi M. | Killimengri's Weblog | Graham Wellstead, The Ferret and Ferreting Guide |
Nymeth | things mean a lot | (Visit her blog for an extensive list of possible titles!) |
Rachel (Book Trout) | Book Trout | Bernd Heinrich, Ravens in Winter Robert Twigger, The Extinction Club Bully for Brontosaurus, by Stephen Jay Gould Equations of Eternity: Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules that Orchestrate the Cosmos, by David Darling |
Cynthia Menard | Withywindle Books | spontaneous |
Gavin (GG) | Page247 | Daniel L. Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes : Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle |
Raquel H. | n/a | spontaneous |
Roy H. | n/a | spontaneous |
Jennifer G. | Waiting on Sunday to drown | spontaneous |
Abbie (AR) | Farmer's Daughter | spontaneous |
Joanne M (JLS) | Joanne Loves Science | Philip Plait, Death from the Skies! : These are the Ways the World Will End-- Hannah Holmes, The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself |
M H Caro (MHC) | n/a | spontaneous |
Heather J. | Age 30+ ... A Lifetime of Books | Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China : The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom Richard Guy, The Mysterious Receding Seas |
Richard (RRT) | n/a | spontaneous |
Isaac (SJB) | n/a | Robin Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland : His Fantastical, Mathematical, Logical Life: An Agony in Eight Fits |
Jeff (JNS) | Bearcastle Blog | Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300 – 1850 Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human : The Science Behind what Makes us Unique John Gribbin, The Birth of Time : How Astronomers Measured the Age of the Universe Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk : How Randomness Rules our Lives Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air : A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America Charles Seife, Sun in a Bottle : The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking |